Mura

Weather has warmed up incredibly ... it was comfortable in Lanzarote and Tenerife, warmer in Cape Verde. By the time we were in Recife yesterday is was JUST PLAIN HOT.

As to Recife, my judgment is that the guides aren’t all that hot (as opposed to the physical temperature) and there really isn’t all that much to see anyway. I saw an early note in my file today that said someone on CC had mentioned that guides weren’t great. I wish I’d remembered that!

I didn’t set up our tour and while I wasn’t happy with the guide, as I say, I don’t know that it was all his fault. His English was good but not flawless. Frequently he struggled to find a word but he was certainly understandable. But when we asked for further details about what we were seeing, he generally couldn’t respond. He knew early on that some in our group were interested in seeing the Synagogue, but never checked to see when it was open ... and wouldn’t you know, it was closed on the day we were there.

I should also say that what I heard second hand was that people on ship’s tours weren’t all that happy with their guides either. AND wherever we went, there was a ship’s tour. (Plus the ship only offered two tours which could have been a hint.)

So I would say that a guided tour in Recife is NOT necessary. They will pretty much just take you to shopping spots anyway, and my judgment (for what little it is worth) is that the shopping wasn’t all that great. We did see a small place in Olinda that had some interesting looking wood carvings but they were too big for me to bring home and so I didn’t even check prices. There are plenty of vendors waving goods at you, none of which looked worth it to me after a cursory glance. Real shoppers may well disagree!

We arrived in Salvador this afternoon but we stayed on board rather than investigating since we have a full day’s tour tomorrow with a guide who grew up in New Jersey ... The highlight of our day was watching Regent’s Seven Seas Mariner dock in back of us ... quite entertaining to watch someone parallel park that baby!

I should add something about the food on MARINA on this trip. In general, as excellent as ever. But I find myself somewhat disappointed in Terrace’s dinners. By no means are we unhappy! The variety remains as wonderful as ever, but the quality doesn’t seem to be of quite the same level. And maybe that is because we were so blown away with the food in Terrace on our first MARINA cruise two years ago that we just got spoiled.

As a further comment, on our August 2012 Black Sea cruise on Regatta someone commented how much better the food in Terrace became after there was a change in chefs ... Not saying that is the reason for our very slight disappointment!

Lastly, we dined in La Reserve last night with the Connoisseur menu. This was no less than absolutely spectacular. WELL worth the extra cost. We enjoyed the Exploration menu two years ago, but Connoisseur is incomparable.

Mura

Patsy happened to show someone her book as I was standing right by her and she is booked solid for the month. So if she doesn't answer right away it's no doubt because she is swamped. She always answered me as quickly as she could (although not necessarily immediately) so I am sure she will answer -- even if it is to say she is booked!

Good luck,

Mura

Ellen,

I don’t mind giving you Patsy’s contact info, just bear in mind that I have been told that she is already booked for the day you will be in port. And I’ve already provided the info to a few others. Of course, I don’t know if you will all want to get together to form a group yourselves.

Things can certainly change in a year. We booked with Patsy around February, but originally it was a woman named Gail and I who were interested. She already had a small group but they were willing to have us join them.

Then they cancelled.

Then GAIL cancelled!

So someone else’s group became mine around April or so.

Patsy also knows of other guides if the need arises. In the end my group ended up being 18 people in a 29 seater (a brand new wonderful Mercedes bus) although we started out as being about half that size. I took pity on some late comers when Patsy said she could get the larger bus for no extra cost to us.

patricialittle@hotmail.com

As to weather, it was pouring our first day in Barcelona, not so bad the next as I recall. Nice the day we left! We had one rainy sea day and it has been warming up. Yesterday was 85 and, no surprise, humid. Seas have been pretty good except for the first day or two which were rough-ish. I tend to be sensitive to the motion but haven't had any problems so far.

Andromeda, I did get your note! Thank you. It just takes so darned long to answer anything! I'll write in more detail when we get home.

La Reserve tonight ...

Mura

As suite passengers, we like a hot breakfast in the room but we only partake on mornings when we have an early tour. Otherwise we go to the GDR (now our preference) or Terrace. If we couldn't have a hot breakfast it wouldn't break our hearts but it IS convenient on those days where we have early departures.

I hadn't noticed a difference in room service menus, however. If this is so, it's news to me. It could be news to me because we've always had at least a veranda cabin, even back with Renaissance. (We prefer a larger cabin, especially a larger bathroom, it is not the "extra perks" that draw us to the higher level cabins.)

Mura

This isn’t a review, just some comments so far on our cruise. We’re just about half way between Barcelona and Rio – on the first of three sea days before arriving at our first Brazilian port.

First of all, I’ve never heard so many foreign languages on an Oceania cruise. (No, I’m not complaining!) We had a lovely dinner with a Dutch couple the other night. One day I ran into a French woman in the corridor who was trying to find the top deck. There is a large group of Philipinos who may or may not be traveling together although often you see them sitting together in groups of 6 or 8 at meal times. (A dinner companion tonight said she thought there are about 40 of them traveling together. She herself is from Hong Kong.) And so on. Many of the languages I recognize, but some I do not.

There is also a good mix of ages. I haven’t seen any children (nor did I expect any at this time of year) but we have 20 and 30 somethings all the way up to the elderly (and I guess we now count as the elderly although I have yet to think of myself that way, Medicare or not).

We’ve been traveling in tandem with the Seven Seas Mariner and two of the Regent passengers shared our shuttle back to the ship in Cape Verde yesterday. One of the women commented on how our group was younger and more active than the people on Mariner. She herself looked to be in her late 50s, perhaps early 60s, so she wasn’t a youngster unhappy at cruising with people older than herself ... she just would have preferred more active fellow passengers.

For those who have complained on other threads about stand-offish crew, I don’t see it. Perhaps those who say Azamara crew are friendlier want more friendliness than we do, I don’t know. But we cannot walk down the hallway without each crew member greeting us. Service by and large in the restaurants has been excellent. We did have a few minor glitches in Polo the other night, but they were very minor and easily corrected.

There is more officer interaction on this cruise as well. I personally have not experienced this, but there was an activity the other day where officers challenged passengers in shuffleboard and the like (I forget exactly which “sports”) and today there was a “country fair” where officers took part.

Back on our fifth and sixth (and maybe seventh) cruises – but not since then – we were invited to dinner with an officer. Usually with another couple or two, and not with the captain but some other lower level officer. They would have dinner with us in one of the specialty restaurants with free flowing wines and these were very enjoyable evenings. But we haven’t been invited to such an event recently and I have wondered if perhaps the reason might be that there are so many more people now who have sailed with Oceania five or more times that it just isn’t feasible to do this any more. Whatever the reason, these were pleasant times but we don’t have to be entertained this way!

So far a very pleasant and relaxing cruise. We had wonderful private tours in Lanzerote and Tenerife, did Cape Verde on our own (not hard to do since there isn’t much to see) and we have some more upcoming in the Brazilian ports. We did Cartagena on our own because there was confusion about when my guide would show up and when he didn’t, we went off on our own. Unfortunately he showed up somewhat later ... but too late for us! We passed on Gibraltar since we’ve already been there several times.

Another delicious dinner in Jacques tonight ...

Mura

Rick,

I should have phrased my comment differently! We've never had anything but friendly and efficient service on any of O's ships, so I don't think we were "just lucky" at all. But if prior complaints had been valid, then perhaps we could have been lucky. But I don't think we were. It was SOP.

Mura

We are on MARINA right now (Day 5 of an 18 day cruise, Barcelona to Rio) and I can't say we've run into any of the problems mentioned. Service has been friendly and efficient. We've had a couple of lunches in Terrace, and 3 dinners so far. We had nothing to complain about.

Hope we're just lucky!

Mura

I am frequently bothered by people in my vicinity on land yacking on their phones or whatever. I especially love the people who are texting or talking and just cross the street without looking to see if I'm going to run them down. Some of these yokels are walking down the middle of the street, not even on the sidewalk.

But to date I haven't been bothered by this kind of activity on O's ships.

I hope that will NEVER happen.

True, I grew up in a time when you just walked to your destination. Someone was quoted in the NY Times a year or so ago. She couldn't understand why she couldn't be on the phone (whether talking or texting) as she walked along the sidewalk. What would she do if she couldn't use her phone?

Well, in my day we WALKED and looked around at the scenery!

Yes, I love my computer and I use it a lot ... but my phone is just a phone.

Color me old fashioned.

Mura

The Oceania cruise from Australia to New Zealand cruises in Milford Sound before it's next port of Dunedin, New Zealand. Does anyway who may have cruised this route before know how close the ship gets to Fiordland National Park? In others words can you see the Fiords very well?

My recollection from 2008 is that we were IN them. The fjords, I mean.

We had wonderful views. But we couldn't leave the ship ...

I don't know about the Park. Since we did not leave the ship I guess the answer is "not at all". OTOH, we had wonderful views of the fjord. We just sailed through, in other words. I suspect if you want to go to the Park you will have to do a land trip. Cruises don't get you everywhere.

Mura

I have to admit that I am one who objected to the cabanas ... they blocked the best views from "up top" and on our Norway cruise no one was up there because it was so FRRRRREEEEZZZZZING cold. But you also couldn't get a pic facing front from the empty cabana because of the shaded window. (I know there's a better way to phrase that but I can't come up with it! Sorry.)

Also, of course, we ourselves would never rent one! Certainly not for the whole cruise. And while I can see the merit of the cabana for someone on a warm weather cruise, for people on colder weather cruises which are port intensive, it really is NOT worth it.

It actually deprives too many people of the use of the area. If you're in the Caribbean only a few benefit. And if you are in cold areas, no one benefits. So while O got income from those warm weather cruises, maybe not from the others.

I admit my prejudice here! (Jim&Stan I think will disagree with me! And no doubt many others.) But then, we aren't "beach" people and so I want to be able to watch from there without obstruction ... and with cabanas, only a very few can have the advantage.

Mura

This is what I have seen also. The last policy I got was past that point so I looked at the site SquareMouth and used a filter for Pre Existing and one company came up that will cover them if you buy before final payment. The price was a little higher but no too bad.

That's good to know. I'll have to check with them when we make final payment on our May cruise.

Mura

The last I checked you have to order the insurance 7-14 days after making your deposit. It depends on the company.

If you look at a site like insuremytrip.com you can see exactly what the requirements are for each company.

Mura

When you want a good meeting spot, for what function?

For leaving the ship? I agree, probably Reception.

If you're staying on board, the ship is small enough that you can just go to the place where you will be going. If you are leaving the ship and don't want to wander around dockside, then probably Reception -- as has already been suggested.

If your rooms are on different decks but not THAT different in location, you could also just meet by the elevators or a particular staircase on one of those floors. If you're on the opposite end of the ship, the I agree that can create a problem. But you're talking about 684 passengers ... not 4000.

Mura

DH was in perfect health (or so we thought) up until the morning before our cruise ;)

 

You just never know ...

Lyn

Exactly right, Lyn. We don't. But I was just trying to point out this can apply to more people than just the traveling couple themselves.

Mura

I just wanted to add one response to Laraine's comment above about "we're in perfect health". I looked to see if anyone had mentioned this but I could have missed it since I was jumping around.

The insurance isn't just for YOU but also for close relatives who might have a problem. We started getting insurance largely because my mother was in her 90s and my husband's brother while only in his 70s was not in good health. We wanted to be covered in case something happened to one of them, as well as if something happened to us that might force us to go home early.

Mura

My DH agrees with you, Dan, but with life insurance not trip insurance. Perhaps because we started buying trip insurance we hadn't yet built up an account to protect us. In general we CAN afford to lose the money ... we just don't want to!

So we do get trip insurance although we try to limit it to cancellation when and if we can.

Back when Renaissance went bankrupt, we were about to pay our final payment for a Singapore-Hong Kong cruise the following January, so we were only out a $500pp deposit when the bankruptcy occurred. We DID get our deposit back from Amex a few months down the road. Most people I knew did as well with the exception of one friend who'd paid his deposit with Discover which did NOT refund his depost. As a consequence he cancelled the credit card.

We ended up replacing that cruise with a January '02 cruise on NCL (on the DREAM which has since been sold) and met two Canadian couples who had been booked on our Singapore-Hong Kong cruise but also the leg before it from Sydney. I don't recall if they had trip insurance or not, but if they did the company reneged and they were out a LOT of money. Clearly that loss didn't break the bank since they replaced the lost 30 day cruise with another one.

Mura

I am really unsympathetic. They took the risk. They could have gotten insurance and chose not to. Not O's fault. It's THEIR fault. O is not their insurer.

Agreed. At least one of those couples just "forgot". (I had a personal letter from them, I just heard about the other couple.) And then they had an unanticipated medical problem. But that is NOT O's fault. If O made an exception for these people, they'd have to make an exception for everyone. And they cannot.

But still, I do sympathize with them because I could see myself forgetting ... although I never have!

However, saying "if they don't give us a credit our future cruises will we elsewhere" ... well, that doesn't fly either. Any other cruise line would take the same approach that O is.

Mura

Getting back to the original question, there is a couple on the Nov 10-20 Marina cruise (BCN-BCN) and another on the Nov 20-Dec 8 Marina cruise (BCN-Rio) that had to cancel after final payment who didn't have insurance.

They are out a lot of money ...

One of the couples is saying that if O doesn't give them credit for another cruise (they had to cancel because of the husband's medical problems) they won't be sailing on O any more. But I myself doubt that any other cruise line would do any different. (They have my sympathies BUT!)

Mura

When we took our first riverboat cruise (Viking in Oct '03) I was struck by how well travelled the passengers were. Yes, they were in general older than those we were seeing on Oceania, but then we were 10 years younger ourselves.

We considered ourselves to be well traveled, but we were novices compared to many of these people. The vast majority of passengers on that cruise were doing independent travel before and after the cruise and the reason they were doing river boat travel was because they'd been just about everywhere else already.

I am not saying this is true of all river boat trips but it was most noticeable on that first trip.

Mura

I have never noticed a difference in size in various PH cabins on any of the "R" ships. Perhaps I'm simply not observant! As I recall, when O instituted the PH1, 2 and 3 categories (as opposed to plain old PHs), it was solely based on location: PH3 being midships, PH2 being somewhat further out and PH3 being on the extremes.

As far as Laraine's comments about 8056, they gibe with our recollection of 8057 on Regatta. I can't recall any noise at all. True, it was a long time ago and perhaps things have changed.

Mura

We did the China trip with Viking in May '08 and it was a class act. Excellent guides. (Each group of 30 thought they had the best guide.)

Hotels also excellent. The group dinners before shows were rushed and okay food, but still worth it for the experience. The Shanghai a show was beyond fabulous.

The Viking ships were new at the time and far more comfortable than the European boats.

My only real complaint was that I wished they gave us more time in Shanghai. The time in Beijing -- 4 days as I recall -- was sufficient. But Shanghai was short.

Mura

We were on that April 2012 Viking cruise in France with Jan, and I have to say we weren't as upset as she was. (I didn't try the shrimp cocktail!)

But we did agree that Viking -- which we really liked in Oct 2003 -- was no longer the wonderful experience we remembered.

It is true that our 3 river boat experiences were with Viking: Oct 2003, Amsterdam-Basel; May 2008, China; April 2012 France (B2B). The first two were most enjoyable, especially China.

Yes, they give you large group walking tours for the most part. Some people have talked about long bus trips from one dock to another ... I have to say that we did have that experience a very few times, but it was not typical. Depending on where you are, it CAN happen. But none of our three riverboat cruises was that the norm.

In China, we were in large buses ... limited to about 30 people per bus. All the guides were wonderful. But there was a lot of driving around in China, obviously.

I think on our Amsterdam-Basel trip we had one bus trip from one port to the next. I don't recall this happening with the Viking France trip.

That MAY be because we opted to take the "Canadian" tour to the Beaches because we had done Normandy on our own back in 2002 and we wanted to return to the Bayeux Tapestry. This visit was on the Canadian tour but not on the US tour. And we were only 5-6 people.

Generally, we've had good walking tours and these days they use the earphones so that you don't have to be on top of the guide in order to hear what he/she is saying. Yes, I agree, larger groups than I would like but generally we've had excellent guides.

Our biggest objection on the French trip was that the river is now so terribly crowded. And I know Laraine wouldn't like this part! In at least half of the ports on the Rhone and Seine Rivers we were double or triple parked, and we were always on the outside. So we had to walk over to the neighboring boats to get to shore. And our top level cabin became worthless because often our view was of the neighboring cabin, not of the shore.

I was nursing a cold one day so I skipped the walking tour of Rouen since we'd been there for three days on our land trip years earlier, and I heard the captain saying that there are now 1,000 boats on the Danube....

I would say that the overcrowding (given the vast expansion of boats now on the rivers) is the worst problem. A river boat experience 10 years ago was much more pleasurable.

By the way, the first river boat on Jan's 2012 cruise was the same one we were on in 2003. Now it had internet, which it did not have in 2003. But dinners were INTERMINABLE! They weren't back in 2003. The same number of passengers, but lots more wait staff. Five servers cannot serve 150 for dinner, especially with a tiny galley, in a reasonable amount of time. So it appears that Viking, at least, is now cutting corners.

We won't do another riverboat experience either, although we HAVE enjoyed them in the past.

Mura

Caviargal,

We've never had a problem getting additional reservations when we wanted them -- but then, we tend not to want them! We're usually in a PH, as well, although occasionally we've been in higher suites. That really hasn't seemed to matter.

A lot does depend on how many of your fellow passengers want the specialty restaurants. I know people who refuse to dine in the GDR and others (like us) who don't really care that much for the specialty restaurants. These days we go at least once to the available restaurants, but we don't always try for more. In fact, usually we do not. There HAVE been cruises when we didn't use ANY of our available reservations. (We do have a fondness of Jacques on the O ships so we will try for extras there.)

Since your previous posts seem to indicate you have flexibility, I find your lack of luck even more surprising.

But here's one way ... I'm not necessarily recommending this as a procedure! We were dining in Polo with friends last year on Regatta and the staff was going out of its way to ask if everything was fine. The maitre d' came by. The waiter asked. The busboy asked! My husband finally had enough and complained (after about six such inquiries). Not only because of the constant questions, but because something hadn't been quite right with our dinner.

As a result the maitre d' called and gave us and our friends another reservation ... they went, we didn't. (They are a couple who absolutely refuse to eat in the GDR because they once had a true disaster of a meal. so they only do Terrace or the specialty restaurants.)

Mura

Do you care to give us a hint as to which cruise you are on?

Are you looking for a specific cabin level or willing to accept anything? One way to monitor availability is to go to the website and "look for a cruise". Just look for the one you want.

If you see that all levels are booked or have waiting lists, the odds probably aren't very good. If it's close to the sailing date, the odds probably are not good. If the cruise is a year off, who knows?

It's really hard to advise, at least in my opinion. Sometimes a particular cruise sells very quickly but another one with a similar itinerary does not.

Ditto to what Lyn said. However, just because Oceania doesn't shine with the after dinner shows (in general, but we have seen some we did enjoy) -- well, that doesn't mean there's nothing else!

There is, in fact, lots of music during the day depending on where you are.

And you can certainly dance at night if you wish. (We don't, I just have heard ...)

Mura